When McCarthyism was a social cancer afflicting America, the country was in short supply of qualified individuals willing to operate on it. Most were fearful the disease might metastasize and destroy them in the process. The fears were true, for the man who ultimately chose to wield a scalpel against McCarthyism suffered for his heroism. But, as the aphorism goes, we all do better in remembering the fall of great men than the triumphs of little ones.
The man is Edward R. Murrow, and this chapter of his life is the content of George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, one of the more stylish and mature releases this fall season. Of the film's many virtues, the one I admire the most is that it reminds me that movies for adults do not always have to flirt with pornography, use blood squibs or require the vocabulary of bathroom stalls.
Murrow was a TV newsman for CBS in the '50s, a time when the people reporting the news on television were actually journalists, not mustachioed voice boxes named Ron Burgundy. In WWII, Murrow reported from London on the Battle of Britain over radio and entered the age of visual broadcasting as one of its most respected figures.
Murrow is disgusted by McCarthy not only for his actions, which Murrow feels are destructive to American society, but also because McCarthy is everything Murrow, a fellow public figure, does not aspire to be: irrational, demagogic, belligerent, dishonest, unprofessional, intolerant of oppositional thinking and drunk on-screen. For Murrow (David Straithairn) and his producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney), it is a misfortune that the Senator is eminent in the American consciousness. It would be a tragedy if he was allowed to further choke it.
Cutting his own pay to shore up lost revenue from ads, Murrow, with his clear voice, underplayed irony and irrepressible eloquence, attacks McCarthy with his program, See it Now, using researched stories and McCarthy's own words. That Murrow is successful remains a fact of history, but he did so at the expense of his own career at CBS, pushed into obscurity by the controversy. The film honors his memory and his legacy.
In setting its tone, the film is shot in black and white. The choice seems partly pragmatic because it uses archived broadcasts from that time. But the decision is mostly aesthetic, because it reminds us of the period the movie is dealing with, a world that wanted to be two-colored, but could not escape the grays.
Smoking, so casual and benign in the '50s, is a critical activity of the characters in this movie. Murrow himself is rarely without a cigarette and it almost feels farcical when the movie plays an ad for Kent, the brand endorsing CBS. But if style is a measure of how we understand life, then simply observing how Murrow smokes is a study of the man himself. The economy of movement, calm of his gestures and the mysterious, wispy trails that seep from his cigarette hide his tremendous intellect and immensity of character. As Murrow, Straithairn submerges himself in his performance of a man defined so perfectly by his mannerisms.
In the end, Good Night, and Good Luck is a film about ideas. It wrestles with many of them, where reporting stops and opinion begins, the morality of neutrality and how the truth imprisons those who cannot reveal it. Actions have consequences in this picture, and its characters realize this and face it.
As a dramatization of history, Good Night, and Good Luck is riveting.
As a film, it is extraordinary.
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